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Digital Immortality
October 1, 2000
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BibTex
Authors

Gordon Bell

Jim Gray
Publication Type
TechReport
Pages
4
Number
MSR-TR-2000-101
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.
Copyright © 2000 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make
digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without
fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this
work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy
otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific
permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212)
869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. The definitive version of this paper can be found at
ACM’s Digital Library –http://www.acm.org/dl/.

Abstract
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Related Info
Abstract
Digital immortality, like ordinary immortality, is a continuum from enduring fame at one end to
endless experience and learning at the other, stopping just short of endless life . Preserving and
transmitting your ideas is one-way immortality : allowing communication with the future.
Endless experience and leaning is two-way immortality : allowing “you,― or at least part of
you, to communicate with the future in the sense that artifact continues to learn and evolve.
Current technology can extend corporal life for a few decades. Both one-way and two-way
immortality require part of a person to be converted to information ( Cyberized ), and stored in a
more durable media. We believe that two-way immortality where one’s experiences are
digitally preserved, and which then take on a life of their own will be possible within the this
century.
Related Info
Related Files
 tr-2000-101.doc
Research Areas
 Computer systems and networking
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